Cookbook reading is an obsession – much like drinking or a game of cards.
I read cookbooks the way other people read mysteries or children devour Harry Potter, compulsively, with an avid, greedy absorption. Cookbook reading is an obsession and a solace, consuming afternoons and evenings better spent elsewhere – much like drinking or a game of cards. It is easy to argue that cookbooks are all alike. A set-piece introduction establishes the author’s credentials: childhood in Madagascar, Michelin chef, expert on fish, chocolate, barbeque, desserts, food for runners, foraging in Patagonia, sour-dough baking or how to cook vegetables so children will eat them. This is followed by recipes either breezy or sober accompanied by comments often both earnest and banal: “So easy! A delicious and unexpected take on banana bread.”
So why read them? Why not knock off another crossword or watch reruns of Top Chef?
Some people say that a recipe is like novel, with ingredients as characters and the steps forming a plot arc that ends with a meal as surely as a 19th century novel ends with a wedding. But I’m not so sure. Ingredients are not so much characters as stereotypes. Sure we can have brown rice and not just white, or lemon grass instead of parsley, but imagine if Natasha was a tender young lettuce, her love life limited to a waltz with vinaigrette or a titillating encounter with sliced raw onion. If Pierre was a sturdy turnip, his only evolution through the tumult of war and peace would be from fresh to frozen.
A recipe is more like a fairy tale. A formula familiar to all, yet shaped by time, place and culture. Take peasants or princes and put them through a trial by fire or water that brings them to a sometimes expected, sometimes spectacular end. A recipe is the reassuring recitation of a well-known story that can be as bland as tea and toast or spiced with the unknown and supernatural. The macaroni is decorated with the inevitable cheese, the hamburger is united with its bun, but wave a wand and the lowly potato becomes vichyssoise, a chicken is cloaked in the mystery of demi-deuil or the regal lobster triumphs in thermidor.
A recipe launches us on a journey
A recipe launches us on a journey. We conjure up our holy grail and set off bravely, silently negotiating the twists, turns and phantom obstacles that lurk on the path to making jam or braising duck. Reading a novel, listening to an opera or watching a movie does not necessarily make us want to chase a white whale, leap from the castle walls after our lover is shot, or be stranded on Mars. But slipping into the skin of the person who does those things is irresistible. I may never make crepes Suzette or whole-fried Szechaun crispy fish, but I love miming the steps of their creation. For a suspended moment I am that person: swirling the batter in a single fluid gesture, deftly handling a cleaver.
My love of reading cookbooks started when I realized that Julia Child was not just typing out a recipe for mayonnaise – she wanted you to understand the pleasure of making it and to anticipate how delicious it would be. At the same time I discovered the wry sense of humor that sparks the Joy of Cooking: who can forget that the pig is a saint and that baking bread is a drama. Since that time I have chewed my way through lavish picture books on the foods of Hungary and academic texts on the origins of the restaurant in France. I have read manuals dedicated to canning, salting and pickling, along with volumes devoted to elaborate cakes and tiny pamphlets attached to tins of curry powder. I hunt down classics at library sales and used book stores. I love the Time-Life series from the sixties entitled, Cuisines of the World. Never mind that the photographs are faded and the recipes can now be found on any of a thousand websites, reading them brings me some of the excitement that their authors first had in introducing these foods to a less informed world.
No books about diets or gadgets
I will not read books about diets (low carb, low fat or gluten free), gadgets (micro-waves, food processors or rice cookers), or the smug reminiscences of people who run charming country inns in Provence or who have given up lives of filthy lucre in Manhattan to move to Sri Lanka and open a spa. I usually draw the line at the profligate output of the Junior League, scout troops and church covens. Although sometimes curiosity impels me to find out what the ladies of Lubbock or Antigonish made for covered-dish dinners in 1972. It is astonishing to discover that so many people named Lou Ann have the secret formula for “the best brownies you’ve ever tasted.”
My collection topples in piles by the bed, and has come to rest in wind-blown heaps around the house. The books on the kitchen shelf can only be removed by prying them, like mussels from their beds, and cannot be replaced without a crowbar. The seed of the collection, dedicated entirely to MFK Fisher, started out on an obscure bottom shelf in the study, and has sown itself like a rampant weed. Oversize tomes comingle with art books and dictionaries, there are overflow sections in the kids’ old bedrooms (The Pillsbury Bake-Off Cookbook, Blueberries for All, Hardy Meals for Hungry Campers). The basement harbors ten years’ worth of Gourmet magazine, their glossy pages thick with writers and ideas and possibility.
The only thing I do not do regularly with these books is cook from them. At least not directly. Or consciously. Not unless I absolutely have to. Which is not to say that I don’t use them – my cooking doesn’t spring whole like Athena from the head of Zeus. All this reading is a form of mental practice. Like a pianist honing that evening’s recital on the plane from London to New York, I imagine piping buttercream or shaving chocolate. I think about how a particular dish is made and compare it with other recipes. Why is the sauce thickened with tapioca instead of flour? What would happen if you added mint? By reading I can conjure up a thousand-and-one more dishes than I can ever make. Roasting a whole goat probably takes the better part of a day, but in your head, it’s just minutes from building the fire to licking the savory juices from your fingers and sighing with the contentment of a job well done.